A guided tour through SAVVY-WS: a methodology for specifying and validating web services compositions

Service-Oriented Architectures are emerging as a promising solution to the problem of developing distributed and evolvable applications that live in an open world. We contend that developing these applications not only requires adopting a new architectural style, but more generally requires re-thinking the whole life-cycle of an application, from development time through deployment to run time. In particular, the traditional boundary between development time and run time is blurring. Validation, which traditionally pertains to development time, must now extend to run time. In this paper, we provide a tutorial introduction to SAVVY-WS, a methodology that aims at providing a novel integrated approach for design-time and run-time validation. SAVVY-WS has been developed in the context of Web service-based applications, composed via the BPEL workflow language.